Kit n' Caboodle
by Jjah-Jjah
Summary: Haru finds a rather unconventional bag of refuse and ends up making some conclusions about herself. (one-shot)


It is I, Jjah-Jjah! Ha ha! My second The Cat Returns fanfic! This category will be filled up yet, despite the fact that my Inuyasha people are probably getting ready to burn down my dorm in retaliation. Well, to that I say, one, I've just got a bit of writer's block, and two, I don't mind if you burn down the dorm! At least that'll get rid of the mold. I wore a frikken hole in my thumbnail trying to scrub the mold out of my air conditioner. Ick.

Anyhoo, a few things. One, there's one thing I've noticed in reviews and other places that I'd like to correct if I may. The Cat Returns is indeed from the infamous Studio Ghibli. However, Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki are not synonymous. Miyazaki-san did not direct The Cat Returns. That's probably why the movie isn't so popular. TCR is actually directed by Hiroyuki Morita. From what I understand, the movie was originally supposed to be directed by some other celebrated director, (not Miyazaki-san) but he apparently "died tragically" and Morita-san, a relatively new director, was brought in at the last minute. (I may not be exact on details.) Anyhoo, I personally thing Morita-san did a damn good job, so there.

Another, I'm going to answer my reviews for my first fic here! Muahahaha!

kIm: My best and first fan… I like the sound of that. Muaha! I'm glad you like my fic. Hopefully your first fan fic will be TCR! If so, I hope to see it soon:D Love ya!

EasyCheesy: There most certainly should be more stories in this category. Yaoi! One of my best friends is a yaoi freak. She's contaminated me, I'm afraid. I guess I agree… I mean, anybody you could put together in this category would just seem kind of…wierd… I mean, Baron and Muta? Muta and Toto? That's kind scary once you think about it… Thanks for reviewing!

OmniGaruGreymon: Mua! Thanks for reviewing. I figured that someone had to start the category, why not me? I'll carry the torch all the way to Rome by myself if I have to! I love the Baron too… He's cool!

QuestionDeca: Thanks for the review! Tell all you friends and acquaintances fics need to be made! The category shall be filled! Muahahahahahahahahaha! (cough).

Water Dragon Lily: BARON FANGIRLS OF THE WORLD UNITE!

sasori: Yay! Thank you for the review! Don't want to write, write! You can do it!

alyhin: Thank you. I tried to keep them in character. I'm glad I succeeded.

Atrus-IV: Excuse me while I cackle with glee. Thank you!

Kazima Kuwabara: A big huzzah for the only other writer in this category so far! Kudos on The Human Returns. I'd be happy to help you with your fic! Whatever you want. Ttyl.

000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Disclaimer: Studio Ghibli owns it…

000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Kit n' Caboodle

It had been raining for five days straight. The ground was soggy, the trees were soggy, the very air was soggy.

Haru had never been so miserable in her life. She was hungry, she was wet, and she suspected that she was growing some sort of fungus somewhere on her person. The pink transparent mini-umbrella that she had stolen out of desperation barely kept her hair from blowing out of her skull. It wasn't a fit day out for man or beast.

At least her final paper was over and done with. She had finally turned it in to her professor and returned her numerous sources to the library. All evidence that she had ever spent so much time on such a depressing subject were scattered to the four winds. What had ever possessed her to want to write twenty-five pages on the effects of erosion on Japanese historical landmarks anyway? She must have had some bad tea or something…

Now that it was afternoon, the wind was getting colder. Water had soaked through her shoes and into her socks. Her toes were numb and she was squishing as she walked. If the weather continued the way it was going, she would have to consider moving to a desert somewhere, where it never rained. Just as she was considering what she would have to pack and how much plane tickets to Africa cost, she was startled out of her thoughts as a car sped through a nearby puddle, splashing muddy water all over her.

She stood there for a moment, contemplating the meaning of life and then she burst from graceful repose.

"You stupid frikken asshole!"

In her frustration, she threw down her pilfered umbrella, which promptly blew away, and shook her fist angrily. Then another car flew by and doused her again. It just wasn't her day…

"Great…" She muttered, forgoing screaming at this new interloper.

And that was when the third car came…

000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

"I'm going to get soo sick… I know it… I know I will…" Haru growled to herself like a crazy old lady, eliciting strange looks from the few people she encountered. She had given up trying to get home by going down "Splash n' Go Alley" as she had dubbed it, and had instead decided that she could cut through a nearby park and come out on a spot only about a block away from her house. Sure, it was a little bit more roundabout a route than that which she usually took, but at least she would be able to avoid becoming submerged.

The park was actually kind of pretty when it rained and it smelled good, fresh and clean. She dragged in a huge lungful of air as she wrapped her thin coat more tightly around herself. She smiled in spite of the situation. She couldn't really feel her ears anymore, but she felt her mood pick up because of all the greenery surrounding. There was a quaint little stone footbridge stretching over a stream that had probably been rather small originally, but under the influence of five days worth of rain it was swollen and angry looking. Undaunted, she walked out onto the structure, pausing a moment to stare mesmerized at rushing muddy water the color of milk chocolate and the occasional piece of debris being carried away, and then she started off.

If the wind hadn't been blowing the way it was, she might not have heard it. At first, she didn't react, discounting it as some trick of the wind, but then a single cry managed to rise up above all the background noise, causing her to stop and turn her head toward the sound. Hearing it again, she moved toward the familiar noise. As she moved forward, she realized she was moving back to the bridge.

"What the…" She trailed off, leaning over the low guardrail and scanning for what was making the sound that she believed she now recognized.

There. The brown sack was just about the same color as the water, very hard to spot. It was about half in, half out of the water, looking as if had snagged on something or other, preventing it from being swept away. That was not what had caught her attention. What had caught her attention was that the bag was meowing.

"Shit!" She immediately ran off the bridge and skidded down the slippery stream bank. She landed awkwardly, one foot on "dry" land and the other submerged in rushing water up to the knee. She grabbed a hold of the waterlogged bag with both hands and attempted to pick it up take it completely out of the water; she could feel movement within. Unfortunately, she misjudged the weight, and staggered back, losing her balance. Sitting in the water while wearing a skirt was a singular experience of which she immediately decided that she would not be repeating again in the near future. "Ugh…" She hissed, and stood up, water sluicing off of her, and shifted the bag onto the shore. So much for not getting submerged. She stood there for a moment, catching her breath and then unwound the twine holding the sack closed.

The first thing she perceived was a wet-looking indiscernible lump, but then a small yellow-eyed head raised up and stared at her blearily before letting out a pitiful meow. Kittens. The bag was full of tiny kittens… She had heard of people who got rid of unwanted puppies or kittens by drowning them, but she had never thought to see it. Why couldn't they just have taken them to an animal shelter? It wasn't so hard! It was a horrible thing to end so many little lives before they had ever really begun.

She pulled each sodden kitten out of the bag, there were six altogether, starting with the one that had been alert enough to notice her presence, a little boy kitten of the palest gray. The other five were black-brown tabby, black, dark gray, calico, and white with black spots. No blues, no greens, no suits, no multicolored eyes. Just small, young, shorthaired and shivering.

"Poor babies!" Haru crooned over them. She had no idea how long they had been exposed; she had to get them warm and dry. She sneezed. She needed to get somewhere warm and dry too. Taking off her thin coat, she laid it out on the ground and then placed all the kittens in a row down one edge. Then she wrapped the ends of it around the little creatures creating a bundle not unlike a kitten bouquet. She left their heads exposed so they could breathe, clutched them to her chest, and then started running off towards home. Unfortunately, as she pulled her one foot out of the water, the current absconded with her shoe… Bah. Well, she needed new ones anyway.

So, she hobbled as fast as she could towards her home, soaking wet, covered in mud and all sorts of icky stream things, and holding a bouquet of half-drowned kittens. Life… You gotta love it…

000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

The front door of her house was undoubtedly the most beautiful thing she had ever seen in her life, topped only by the inside of her house as she opened the door. She kicked off her single shoe, slipped on her house slippers, and made a beeline to the bathroom.

Haru counted her lucky stars that the bathroom had a heater. She flipped the contraption on and stripped down to her underwear. There was no use wearing muddy, nasty clothes if you didn't have to. Besides, she was the only one home. Her mother had gone off to Kyoto to pick out some kind of wonder material for her next quilting project and wouldn't be back till the day after tomorrow.

The kittens were freezing. Despite the rapidly warming climate, they were still shivering as if they were in the artic. So, Haru decided to do to them what she wanted to do to herself to warm up: a hot bath.

Well, not too hot… She tested the heat of the water with her hand to make sure it was bearable, sat the kittens in a pile on one side of her, and a stack of fluffy towels on the other. Then she picked up the tabby kitten, since it was moving the least, and held it on one hand as she held it under the steamy water. She was pretty sure that under normal circumstances, if she had tried to give kittens a bath, she would have gotten an armful of scratches for her trouble, but luckily for her these kittens were so out of it, that all they seemed to register was that they were getting warm. The only one that put up any kind of protest was the pale gray, who merely let out one degraded meow. After each one was washed, she dried them with the towels till their fur poofed out in all directions and then set them in a makeshift corral made out of other towels.

Once she was done with them, she managed to take a quick shower before the hot water ran out, wrapped herself in the only remaining clean towel, and took both herself and the kittens into her room. She found a box and deposited them in it. Then, she dressed in her pajamas and went to go clean up the mess she'd made. She hung everything that was wet up to dry, sneezed a few times, warmed up a thermos of soup from the fridge, filled a saucer with milk, and returned to her room.

The kittens were as she left them. She took them all out of the box and set them around the saucer. All of them managed at least one or two hesitant licks, but they didn't seem overly interested. Haru sipped on her soup as she watched them. She had determined that the pale gray, black, and white with black spots were boys and the tabby, dark gray, and calico were girls. They were all incredibly cute. Why would anyone want to throw them away?

Unwillingly, her mind wandered to the incredible experience of years earlier. With her luck, these kittens would probably be Yuki and Prince Lune's kidnapped children that she had saved from a watery grave. Any moment now they would all stand up on their hind legs, bow, thank her for saving their lives, and promise to return to thank her properly…

Eeek!

But then again, would that be such a bad thing? Surely Lune was king now, and he wouldn't put her through all the crap his father had. Maybe she'd get to see the Baron and Muta and Toto again. But in order to find them, she'd have to "need" them, and if Lune was in charge, she wouldn't "need" them, and if she didn't "need" them, she couldn't find them, now could she? Damn. Where the hell was the ibuprofen? She missed her friends, the Baron most of all, but she couldn't find them. She was not in danger. She was not about to be married against her will to a cat. The Cat Bureau was only for people who needed help, so since she was not in dire straights, she couldn't find it. Ah well. She still had a few years left. The chances of her not getting into another freaky life-threatening situation within her lifetime were statistically slim.

"Hey." She whispered conspiratorially, bending down over the kittens so they could hear her, "You guys aren't royalty, are you?"

No answer. Well, better luck next time. Haru clumsily set down her now empty thermos and yawned. 'Haru tired. Haru need sleep.' She thought. And then she sneezed. She stood, grabbing a tissue and blowing her nose as she headed to the bathroom to brush her teeth. Yup. She was sick. Whooptie frikken doo. At least she had gotten sick doing a good deed. She wouldn't go to hell now…

When she finally made it back to her room and got ready to go to bed, she stopped. She had been going to keep the kittens in the box, but now she just couldn't do it. They were young and alone and maybe her own sense of loneliness made her do it, but she found herself tucking all six kittens into bed with her. She set her alarm and then lay down on her side so she could curl her body around the little ones protectively.

The last things she remembered before she fell asleep were six individual contented purrs.

000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

She woke up the next morning to the sound of her ox-shaped alarm clock doing its daily happy dance.

She groaned and attempted to reach over and turn it off, but her arm felt like it was pinned down. Before she could figure out what was wrong, she was surprised by the alarm turning off on its own. She opened a sleep bleared eye to look at the plastic contraption only to see that there was a kitten sitting on it.

More specifically, the pale gray kitten was sitting on it, and if the expression on his face was enough to go by, he had turned the alarm off on purpose. She blinked, he blinked. Then, he made the easy leap from the desk to the bed and wallowed across the plush blankets to sit right in front of her face. He rubbed his fuzzy cheek against the hollow of her throat and purred softly before he looked her straight in the eye and spoke.

Now, he didn't speak the same way Prince Lune had, right after she'd rescued him. The sounds were that of any other cat, but for some reason they translated in her mind as something other than "meow". Sudden faded sepia clips of her memories of talking to Yuki that she had regained from talking with her mother flared to life like a match. She was doing the same thing now that she had done then…

Cool.

"You saved us." He said. "Thank you."

"No prob." Haru yawned.

"If there's anything we can do to—"

"Whoop! Hold it there!" Haru interrupted. "You don't have to do anything to repay me, or thank me, or anything remotely similar. Yeesh. What is it with cats and repayment?"

"Sorry." His ears drooped down in a picture of unimaginably cute dejectedness. 'Awww.', thought Haru.

"You didn't do anything." She smiled rubbing him behind the ears till he perked up with her free arm. (She had discovered that the reason her other arm was immobile was because the black and white kitten was sleeping on it.) She noticed that slowly, the other kittens were waking up and taking notice of the exchange between their sibling and their rescuer. "What happened to you guys? Why were you in that bag?" Ears drooped once again.

"That man…" The voice was not that of the pale gray, but that of his tabby sister who was curled up on Haru's belly. "That man said that he didn't want us in his yard. Mother would hide us from him, but then one day, she didn't come back."

"We waited a long time." The black kitten continued, "We got worried about her and went to look for her. That's when the man found us and put us in the bag."

Haru didn't wait for them to explain any further. She simply gathered them all up into a big hug, including the black and white one who was still asleep, and stroked their fur. It was easier to comfort cats than it was to comfort humans. When Yuki was a kitten, she had said, "Life is tough." She was right. She didn't have to explain to them that their mother was probably dead; they already knew. Such was the way of life. This they understood, and they would carry on and survive in a world that they knew was both dangerous and wonderful at the same time. Haru envied them for that.

"My name is Haru. What are your names?"

"They call me Saru." said the pale gray.

"I'm Mii." the tabby smiled.

"Yami!" crowed the black, as he did a little introductory jig.

"My name is Suki." The calico purred shyly.

"The name's Saeko." The dark gray struck a pose that reminded Haru eerily of Sailor Moon. Cats didn't watch anime, did they?

The black and white kitten was still asleep. All the other kittens glared at him, till Saeko, who was closest to him, stood up shakily on her hind legs just long enough to give him a swift kick in the head. "And this is Nammon." Nammon blinked and smiled absently.

"It's a pleasure to meet you." They said all together, bowing their heads in unison. Haru smiled a bowed also.

"It's a pleasure to meet you as well…"

000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

The kitchen was a chorus of hungry meows.

"Settle down!" Haru half-laughed. It was a trial fixing breakfast with four ravenous cats underfoot. Four, because Saru had scaled the cabinets like the monkey he was named after and was currently staring at the bacon sizzling in the skillet like it was, and Nammon was hanging from her pant leg like some kind of crazed fashion accessory.

This was fun. Maybe she was just lonely or bored, but she was strangely content to be surrounded by kittens. Perhaps it was the fact that she was talking to cats again. Yes, that had to be it. She was Haru, and Haru talked to cats. Haru had been kidnapped to the Kingdom of Cats. Haru had braved the King's labyrinth. Haru had fallen from the sky and walked a bridge of crows down to earth. Haru had nearly been a cat herself. Haru had known the Baron. These were all things that made up who she was, and now that she was embracing it instead of just thinking about it, she felt strangely whole.

A bit later, once the food was all done, she had made herself some of her special tea, and her kittens were all chowing down, she found herself at the butt of an unusual request.

"Tell us a story, Haru!"

"Yes, a story!"

"Come on Haru, I bet you tell great stories!"

She shook her head and smiled, closing her eyes briefly in thought. "Ok, ok. I'll tell a story." Her charges curled up and stared at her face in wide-eyed anticipation. Then, Haru began.

"Once upon a time, there was a girl. She was pretty much a normal school girl. She was always late, had a best friend, and had a crush on a certain boy. Then, one day, she was walking with her best friend. They were having a playful argument, and the girl was chasing her friend around with a lacrosse stick, when they both saw a strange cat walking down the street carrying a little package in its mouth. They watched the cat crossing the busy street, and saw it drop its package. While it was trying to pick it back up, a distracted truck driver barreled towards the animal. It looked like there wasn't any hope for the cat! But then, the girl grabbed the lacrosse stick, and…"

000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Muahaha! Write for this category people! And R&R!

Tata, JJ.


End file.
